The Early VS The Contemporary, ‘female’ VS ‘woman’, ‘male’ VS ‘man’

—— What are Philosophers Thinking?

Given the dataset from philosophers in different schools and times, let's first get familiar with them for inspiration!

Most of the sentences in different schools go beyond 10000! And the sentence lengths are also comparable!

There must be much information waiting for us!

The original publication dates are concentrated in 500 BC to 250 and 1500 to 2000.

What did people do in 500 BC? And what about in 2000? Things are totally different in technology, thoughts, environment and many other aspects.

So, what are philosophers thinking in different times? What's new after thousands of years? What remains unchanged?

Let's split the dataset into 'before'(500 BC-250) and 'after'(1500-2000) to take a look!

Chapter 1: The Early VS The Contemporary

The image on the left is the word cloud of 'before' sentence, and the right one is the word cloud from 'after'.

With the 2 word clouds as the first understanding, we can find some keywords such as 'animal', 'body', 'soul', 'nature', 'god' for 'before' and 'world', 'power', 'existence', 'law' for 'after'.

Though the word clouds are not quantitative, we can still make a guess about the related topics of 'before' and 'after':

'before' is more focused on nature, biology and actuality while 'after' includes more about the class system.

The guess might not be accurate.

Let's do topic modeling for a quantitative explanation!

The following graphs are word count and weight of topic keywords in 'before' and 'after'.

And the tables are keywords and the most representative sentence for each topic.

Given the graph and table in 'before', we select some representative words:

water air earth animals nature fire people love soul body

These words indicate that 'before' focuses mainly on natural existence.

We select representative words about 'after' as well:

woman love class rent trade price power labour black commodity existence capital law wages tax

So the main topic regarding to 'after' would be self identity, class system and capitalism.

Interesting findings!

So what's the reason for this huge shift in topics? It may have something to do with inventions by new technology, progress in thoughts, etc.

Since we only know about authors and schools of the representative words, let's dig a little deep to see which schools contribute to these topics.

Here are some bar graphs for the top 2 schools in 'before' and top 3 schools in 'after' that have the most frequency of the given word.

The results all correspond to the analyze of topic modeling above and are detailed in specific schools.

For topics related with natural existence, we find that the top schools among all are Aristotle and Stoicism in 'before'.

We can also take a look at the word cloud of Aristotle, which is strongly related to natural existence.

For topics related with class system, we find that the top schools are all in 'after'.

For topics related with self identity, we find that the top school among all is German Idealism in 'after'.

For topics related with capitalism, we find that the top schools are Capitalism and Communism in 'after'.

The word cloud of Capitalism is full of these topics as we expect.

We also find that the words 'time' and 'life' are highly mentioned all the time!

Maybe philosophers are always interested in things that everlasting.

Now we've known a lot about the different topics philosophers interested in and corresponded schools and part of the reasons!

However, we find some surprising and confusing results among these bar graphs.

Chapter 2: 'female' VS 'woman', 'male' VS 'man'

While 'female' and 'woman' are similar in meaning, the word frequency of woman is close to zero in 'before' compared with that of female.

Why would that happen?

Since most of the word frequencies of both 'female' and 'woman' are contributed by Aristotle and Feminism, we can concentrate on the two schools here.

We extract sentences include 'female' and 'woman' separately from Aristotle and Feminism, then check the most mentioned words except stop words.

The related words with 'female' here indicate that 'female' connotes a biological category, while 'woman' connotes a whole human person and is more focused on the family and social roles.

In Feminism, things become a little different.

'Female' here no longer represents a biological category, but rather reflects the deep thinking of individuals from a lower class view by Feminism.

'Woman' in the two schools stays about the same meaning.

Given the different meanings of 'female' and 'woman' in different times and schools, we can come to the conclusion:

The comparable word frequency of 'female' in Aristotle is mainly because philosophers in 'before' focused their topics on natural existence, which exactly matches what 'female' means at the time.

Similarly, the reason why 'woman' has little word frequency is that philosophers in 'before' seldom thought about self identity, class system or else.

The word clouds of 'female' and 'woman' in Aristotle and Feminism also prove the conclusion!

row1: 'female' in Aristotle; 'woman' in Aristotle
row2: 'female' in Feminism; 'woman' in Feminism

Based on gender equality, let's take a look at boys as well:)

Surprise again!

While the proportion of 'male' in 'before' to 'after' is close to that of 'female', indicating that the case might be the same as we discuss above, 'man' here is a totally different story.

Why is 'man' mentioned so often even in 'before'?

We just extract sentences as before and see the results first.

Given the four graphs, most of the keywords are similar to 'female' and 'woman'.

For 'man in Stoicism', there are some unfamiliar words such as 'thou', 'unto', 'doth', 'thy', 'thee'.

In fact, these are old-fashioned words that escape stopword package and can't refer to new topics. The left words are still about family and social roles.

Since topics remain the same as 'female' and 'woman', the only reason of high word frequency of 'man' in 'before' would be the male-dominated society.

We can prove the situation in an indirect way in Chapter 3.

Chapter 3: Men and Women

Now, we have talked about the gender bias between men and women.

Let's use data to have a more precise version!

This is a plot about the proportion of sentences that mention woman(man) also mention man(woman).

Since man and woman are symbols of family and social roles here, the fact that 43.36% of the sentences which mention woman in Aristotle also mention man, and 1.57% for the opposite can reflect such bias.

Fortunately the trend is getting better given the plot of Feminism!

Philosopher's attitudes towards men and women also follow the trend.

Hopefully, this trend will continue until the society achieves gender equality.

From this story, we learn about the shift in topics philosophers caring about as well as different meanings in specific words.

We know a little more about what philosophers are thinking now!

In general, philosophers are always in an effort to change their mind to keep pace with the external and internal world!

And more and more are waiting for us to read and discover!

Thanks for reading:)

Hongyan Zhou